This week I had the honor to make a presentation at ELI in San Antonio with 4 remarkable women: Leslie Madsen-Brooks, Laura Blankenship, Barbara Ganley and Martha Burtis…”The Fear 2.0 Dream Team Bloghers” as Brian Lamb reportedly referred to us later in the week.
Our topic was Fear…the fear that we as educators, technologists, individuals … feel when we explore and use new social software tools in our teaching and learning. It is also about the barricades that our institutions (rightly or wrongly) create as a way to “protect” us from those nefarious evil things “out there.” It is about our institutions keeping an external facing façade that masks any of that messy learning that might be going on in the inside. It is about disruption to the old tried and true cycles…and then repair.
Our intended outcome was to move the group BEYOND fear. To stop being paralyzed and moving through it. As BG so emphatically said as she framed the “charge” for our audience, what are the tools we need to help ourselves move through the forest of fear? Can we collectively collaborate and come up with solutions, suggestions?
The presentation was well received. Perhaps it was because we encouraged our audience to break into small groups and collaborate. Or maybe it was the sticky notes. (yay for sticky notes) Maybe it was because we did not use powerpoint. I dunno. Anyway, we seemed to have hit on something because we encouraged people to think of solutions vs spending time wallowing in despair.
Here is a link to the presentations (our digidramas). Leslie’s is a Voicethread video and we hope people will register for Voicethread and leave a comment on her video. Please leave comments there and/or on the Fear 2.0 blog too.
Podcasts, keynotes, and other information about the conference can be found here
For a grand description of what the ELI is like, please see Laura’s post here
For a really interesting post on what it was like to “attend” the conference vicariously via Twitter, please read Jim Groom’s post here
THIS JUST IN! Thanks to Martha for finding this little gem (also tagged elifear08, hmmm) on YouTube
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